Humans run on corrupted hardware: mental health.

Trauma, depression, akrasia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia ), suicide, addiction to junk food, and many common mental health "illnesses" are most likely not illnesses.

They are 𝘢𝘥𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 that get activated.

Abuse (sexual, physical, emotional) doesn't directly cause trauma in the same way as a knife wound causes a scar.

Our brains are deliberately wired to go into a trauma-mode following abuse.

I knew someone whose parents had the bright idea of showing them hardcore pornography when they were a young child.

The result was a person who had trouble holding down a relationship and had a bunch of what we politely call "issues".

I also recently met someone else with really serious anger "issues". Unsurprisingly they told me that they had been abused physically as a child.

But it's important to remember that these "issues" are nature's way of adapting a person to what nature's best guess about the environment is.

Zoom out a bit and think about it like this: your unconscious mind has been mercilessly optimized by evolution.

It would probably be easier for the adult brain to have a personality that simply couldn't be "damaged" by abuse (a constant is simpler than a variable!) ...

... so why aren't we like that?

Because that wouldn't be optimal: the people who didn't adapt based on these signals were less able to survive and reproduce in the past.

On food: the theory behind the so-called "Shangri-La diet" is basically that nice food triggers an adaptation in humans for us to gorge ourselves and put on fat, in a way that bland food doesn't.

I'm not sure I entirely believe the diet & its theory, but it's worth noting that in the past being somewhat fat was likely highly adaptive, as that stored fat could be used to survive through harsh times (famine).

But being seriously obese is not adaptive; beyond where women look "curvy" and where people look like they are sick.

The brain does this on purpose, it's maladaptive, so why?

Why not have a device that measures how fat the body is, and stop the food-cravings once the fat level exceeds a certain point? That would lead to an objectively better organism?

The answer is that in our ancestral environment (as hunter-gatherers and to some extent as peasant farmers), population was largely limited by food.

If there was excess food, new people would be created to eat it. This would happen until people started dying of starvation.

So the food supply conditions that create the opportunity for morbid obesity were reliably impossible in the past.

It is only really in the last 100 years that we have had sufficient food for everyone, all the time.

It is only in the last few thousand years that even some places have had reliable rule of law, and only about 100 that we have had police, distant travel for all and a uniform "society" that was out there for anyone.

Humans can survive in the modern environment. It's better than being teleported to the surface of Venus. But we are horribly maladapted to it.

We are better adapted to a slightly less stable environment with famines and widespread physical abuse that you can't escape from.

But that doesn't mean that such an environment is better. Unless you're a real masochist! https://twitter.com/StruanCurtis/status/1332470718983004162

Relevant video for the #ReturnToMonkey people: chimps have a tribe-level fight with fists and the winners turn to cannibalism:#t=3m15s

For people who want a scientific reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5046779/

Essentially, if a young girl is abused or exposed to adversity (like divorce), her unconscious mind "predicts" future adversity and an adaptation for early puberty and mating early with aggressive, violent men kicks in.